Mothers, Daughters and ‘Girls’: A Conversation

Elly Brinkley is a junior at Harvard studying Philosophy and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Evangeline Morphos is a media expert who teaches Film and television at Columbia. They both watched “Girls” and filed this story about their dialogue about the show.

Part 1. Girls and Moms

EM: As my generation kicks back on Sunday nights and makes do with “Downton Abbey” until “Mad Men” returns in April, my daughter’s generation is avidly watching “Girls.” We were spending Sunday nights in two separate universes.

ELLY: In one of her many attempts to connect with my generation, my mother asked to have a conversation with me about HBO’s “Girls” and “what she’s missing.” So now we’re settling into the dated archetypes of the out-of-touch mother and the rebellious daughter—neither of which is really true, even though I do have a nose ring, and it did take her 45 minutes to figure out how to do this over G-chat—to try to come to some sort of mutual understanding of what all the fuss is about.

EM: In Episode 3 of Season 2, Hannah’s new boyfriend, Sandy, reveals that he had been reluctant to tell her he had read her essay because “I just didn’t feel anything happened in it…nothing was happening…” Hannah counters defensively that “ a girl’s whole perspective on who she was and her sexuality changed, but if that feels like nothing was happening….”

I have to say that his words reflect my initial reaction to the series.

ELLY: You have to remember that “Girls” is a comedy.

EM: But the show doesn’t conform to the traditional format of half-hour comedy, nor do the characters—Liz Lemon in “30 Rock” is a clear descendant of Lucy, and Carrie Bradshaw could be living in the same apartment as “That Girl.”

ELLY: I don’t know what “That Girl” is.

EM: (1960′s–Marlo Thomas)

ELLY: “Girls” has a higher standard to live up to than most comedies. Critics were hailing it as a zeitgeist-defining show before the pilot even aired. When the media decides that a show defines an era, it wants the show to define it according to terms it understands. Print media is controlled by people outside of Hannah’s generation; but online media is starting to come into the hands of her peers.

Online recaps focus on how and why the show rings true, while more formal, print reviews focus on decrying our generation, and how it is choosing to represent itself.

EM : We were reading two different sets of critics. That’s one of the reasons I found the show so unsettling at the beginning. I felt you had to be 20-something to get it.

Lena Dunham has created a character that seems worlds away from the smart, in-charge show-runner that has been dominating this year’s awards ceremonies. Yet, in addition to the real-life tattoos, Dunham seems to suggest that there is more of an overlap between her and her character of Hannah. The world of “Girls” reflects her own generational understanding of relationships, sexuality and ambition. It seems very self-indulgent.

ELLY: Sure, it’s a little self-indulgent, but I think that’s the direction art is moving in.

The locus of drama has changed. Before the Internet, dramatic action happened in a closed community—an apartment, a workplace. Now our lives are being broadcast for a huge network of people to see. There is too big of a cast and too many sets to be contained in a traditional narrative form.

Maybe you feel “nothing happens” because the canvas of the story is spread over a wider landscape. Our communities are larger; relationships are now dispersed across such a wide net that dramatic action is now centered around ourselves.

EM: At the same time, each character seems to want to individualize her experience.

Elly: We need a way to stand out in what seems like an infinite network of people with whom we’re connected.

I just don’t see the characters in “Girls” accessing their individuality—or the culture around them. In episode 3 it was almost a relief to see Marnie initially react with horror as she is trapped inside of Booth Jonathan’s experiential sensory box. Yet, when she emerges she calls it “genius”. Pretentious or not, at least she seemed willing to engage.

Elly: Maybe you see our generation as inhabiting a cultural wasteland; but we are defining the culture differently. This season Marnie has just been ousted from the art world, a world that was hip and cutting edge in your generation, but now is a symbol of the establishment.

EM: What’s replacing it? The new cultural scene seems of be dominated by people like the whacked-out blogosphere editor of “jazzhate”?

Elly: Like it or not, this is how a lot of women in my generation are accessing culture. Blogs have become the new cultural hub. “Jazzhate” is clearly based on Jane Pratt’s xojane.com, which, along with other sites like jezebel.com, caters to younger women. These are women who take certain third-wave feminist principles as a given, like their news with a little bit of snark, and don’t mind getting celebrity gossip and political commentary in the same place.

These are not blogs centered on a topic, but a type of person.

EM: It’s certainly different than Carrie Bradshaw’s blog a generation earlier–hers was a personal point of view.

Elly: That wasn’t a blog, Mother. That was a column. In a black and white print newspaper–on paper– made from pulp.

A convention on these blogs is for authors to use the first person plural instead of the first person singular–”I” becomes “we,” indicating that these blogs are meant to represent a demographic. They elevate the writer to a stand-in for the entire audience.

EM: If Hannah is the “we” of your generation, why can’t we make judgments about that point of view?

The word “judgmental” is such a taboo for these characters. All of my instincts, however, tell me that many of Hannah’s actions are dangerous, or self-destructive. (Love the character of Adam—don’t want him dating my daughter) Yet, the show blockades me from passing judgment.

Elly: I think the show gives you permission to judge pretty much every character.

By the end of the first season, it becomes clear that none of the characters (with the possible exception of Shoshanna) are meant to be entirely likeable. In a recent Vanity Fair interview with Allison Williams she says: “I actually think the moments where she teeters into unsympathetic territory are, ironically, the moments that make her feel much more human.”

EM: Last night’s episode “One Man’s Trash” finally gives my generation the New York romantic comedy I think I’ve we’ve been missing. Hannah and Joshua “meet cute” (although it’s because she’s been secretly trash-stalking his garbage cans); he has this great brownstone, and they kiss on the granite counters; they make love and Joshua says she is “truly beautiful”; there is a montage of them frolicking the next day(granted it includes ping pong in their underwear) Perfect!

“I want to be happy; but I never thought I did…I want what they all want…” Hannah declares. Is this a turning point in Hannah growing up? Fortunately, NO. She can’t process normalacy, and blows the romantic moment with a rant about her need to “feel” everything. This sends the 4O-something Joshua into a generational panic. (He would still like to add the sunroom to his back yard).

Why am I relieved to have seen a glimpse of what “Girls” might have been like if it was normed; and why am I even more relieved to see it snap back to the quirky story I have grown to love.

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“Girls” star Allison Williams at the “Makers” New York premiere.

Part 2. “Girls” and Women

EM: Why the title “Girls”? Ever since the 70’s my generation has made a point of insisting on the term “women.” (Marilyn French’s early novel about the growth of a suburban character into feminism—The Women”s Room—famously had a cover in which the word “Ladies” had been crossed out and replaced with “Women’s.”) It’s odd that the chief criticism leveled at Mad Men has to do with its portrayal of women—that they don’t seem in charge of their lives. The justification, of course, is that was the reality of attitudes back then.

Elly: I can’t help but feel there is a gender difference now as well. The expectations are much different for young men in my generation. Irresponsible behavior can be excused as “college mentality” well into a man’s twenties, but women aren’t allowed that leeway.

I’m thinking about the male characters in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. They are around the same age as the women in Girls, but they aren’t even trying to enter into the adult world. They sit on their couch, rip bongs, and try to compile lists of nude scenes.

EM: I came to a reassessment of Apatow’s films when I heard him in discussion with Mike Nichols at MOMA. Nichols made the case that Apatow’s films were as successful in depicting contemporary male angst as “The Graduate” or “Carnal Knowledge” had been in depicting their/my generation. (I now look at “le f’art film” very differently.)

Elly: At least the characters in Girls are living in a simulacrum of adulthood. They might not be doing it perfectly, but at least they’re doing it.

EM: Not that I mourn the absence of a feminist character, but why doesn’t any character deal with that issue? Does post-feminism mean that we have truly achieved an equality where a woman’s sex life can be as messed up as any protagonist of a Judd Apatow movie?

Elly: POST FEMINISM IS NOT A THING. I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT POST-FEMINISM IS NOT A THING!

We do not live in a post-feminist world any more than we live in a post-racial world. The absence of a feminist character does not necessarily mean that the show is rejecting feminism.

The characters of “Girls” are sometimes caught between feminist ideals and societal pressures of femininity. That these characters do not always follow feminist ideals speaks to a challenge that liberal, educated young women have today—reconciling their feminist beliefs with very real pressures to conform to standard conceptions of femininity.

EM: In a segment of “Inside the Episode” Lena Dunham says that season 2 is about these characters moving into a “correct version of themselves.” Hannah and her friends are “transitioning” into women.

Elly: These characters are adult women, but they don’t feel they are adults yet. Each character in the show is trying to build her own adult life; but none know how to do it.

EM: The character of Hannah seems to be in a constant state of “becoming.” Her father says : “What does a person like that turn into? “ And even her wonderfully creepy boss excuses her attempts to seduce, sue and extort him in rapid fire-succession by saying “…you have so much potential.” Can we still hold Hannah and her friends accountable–dramatically–for the choices they are making?

Elly: At this point in their lives, every decision seems to weigh heavy in the arc of their coming of age. A judgment of any one action is a condemnation of the way she has chosen to live her entire life.

EM: I’m just not sure that Hannah trusts her own experiences to be real. She takes cocaine in order to fuel her experience for a blog; she stays to watch Adam masturbate because it might be “good for the story” and the most privately true revelations in her journal are about Marnie and Charlie’s relationship, not her own. Isn’t she suggesting that her own judgments aren’t valid?

Elly: I think Hannah has an idea of what her life is supposed to be like that doesn’t align with reality. I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t trust her own experiences, it’s that her own experiences aren’t quite as interesting as she wants them to be. She’s even jealous of her old writing rival from college because her boyfriend killed himself. It’s not that her judgments aren’t valid, it’s that she has delusions of chaos about her actually pretty normal life.

HBO

Jemima Kirke in “Girls.”

Part 3. Sex and the Borough

EM: It’s not that the characters in “Girls” are having too much sex–it’s that it’s the wrong kind of sex. Shoshana is the only character who seems to stand up for her dignity: “I may be deflowered, but I’m not devalued.”

Elly: “Girls” does not aim to moralize, rather, it portrays young women’s lives—and their sexuality–as realistically as possible.

EM: But I moralize about the characters in the show.

Elly: In the season one episode “Vagina Panic,” Shoshanna refers to a dating self-help book called “Listen Ladies!: A Tough Love Approach to the Tough Game of Love,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, with advice like, “Sex from behind is degrading, point blank. You deserve someone who wants to look in your beautiful face ladies.”

EM: Yet, Hannah herself has indulged in that kind of sex with Adam.

Elly: Hannah admits to having “hate-read” the book, “Listen, Ladies” while the ostensibly more self-assured Jessa vehemently denies that she is one of “the ladies” the book speaks to.

Hannah recognizes that as an empowered young woman she is not supposed to enjoy the book, but her reaction belies some very real vulnerabilities about her sexuality.

Jessa derides the book: “What if I want to focus on something else? What if I want to feel like I have udders? This woman doesn’t care about what I want.”

“It might be pink and cheesy, but there’s actually some very real wisdom in there.” Hannah concludes.

EM: Carrie Bradshaw’s world in “Sex and the City“–although troubled–was more aspirational. Are we more comfortable with the fiction of possibility than we are with the reality of, well, reality? (I’m not saying that Carrie Bradshaw was aspirational in every facet of her life and behavior, but Barney’s did become the department store of choice for smart twenty-thirty?-somethings; and I did begin drinking cosmopolitans at that time.)

If anything, “Sex and the City” was a celebration of the sexual revolution. Sex seems like such a burden in “Girls.” It’s carbohydrates—you get the calories, but none of the real nutrients.

Elly: A scene in the most recent episode speaks to this tension. Marnie says “I just don’t think anyone should do anything they’re not comfortable with, especially when it comes to sex. “Hannah replies: “Well, yes, Marnie, that’s the principle behind not raping people. I don’t know, just, unlike you, I’ll do almost anything sexually.”

Here Hannah is engaging in a sexual one-upmanship with Marnie, but what is at stake is not who is more desirable or successful, but who is more comfortable with her sexuality.

Of course, neither Marnie nor Hannah seems to be all that comfortable with sex. Marnie was never able to communicate her sexual needs even to her very serious, long-term boyfriend, and she reverts to adolescent self-consciousness in the presence of Booth Jonathan. Hannah has a whole slew of issues–or as she might say, “a platter of stuff.” It is possible that her sex life was more fulfilling when she started dating Adam, but I have a very hard time believing that he made her “whole body feel like a clit.”

EM: A problem for me is that Hannah just doesn’t feel in control of her own sexuality. Throughout the first season, she was always playing catch-up to Adam’s sexual games—whether he wanted her to role-play the 11-year old heroine addict or the prostitute watching him masturbate.

Elly: Hannah’s not in control of her sexuality; but that feels pretty realistic to me. I think a lot of women my age confuse sexual liberation with constant sexual satisfaction. Now that it’s OK–even expected–for women to enjoy sex, a lot of them feel like something’s wrong with them if they’re not into kind of kinky stuff or if they don’t have an orgasm every time. That certainly seems to be Hannah’s perspective, and it leads her to put aside her own sexual satisfaction in the name of her sexual image. For her, sex seems to be more about her partner’s perception of her than about her own pleasure. Now, I’m not one to be judgmental of people’s sexual practices, but I do think there’s more likely that something is wrong if you get off on Cabbage Patch lunchbox fantasies than if you don’t…

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Lena Dunham with her award for best actress in a TV comedy series for “Girls” during the 70th Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Jan. 13, 2013, in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Part 4. Girls and Grownups

EM: What about the adults in this show? I would like to think that there is an adult who could provide a perspective. (Someone with whom I could identify) But every adult character in Hannah’s world carries their own baggage and damage. When Hannah goes back home for her parents anniversary we hear that they cut her off “so that she would have something to write about”. Then there is Hannah’s boss, Rich, who is constantly copping a feel. When she confronts him with it, she loses control of the situation.

Marni’s boss fires her in front of a Cynthia Rowley boutique; her mother refuses to use the word “fired”—insisting rather on “transitioning;” and the gallery owner (played by Lena Dunham’s own mother) to whom she applies for a job finds out that she is wearing an Ann Taylor suit and then says :”I don’t see you in the art world.”

(By the way, Lena Dunham said that her mother was the “biggest diva” she has ever worked with. Just saying.)

Elly: I think one of the things that’s scary about being right out of college is that there aren’t adults in your life anymore–because you’re now supposed to be an adult yourself. The age bracket you consider to be your peer group expands–Ray, Charlie’s best friend, is 33 to the rest of the characters’ 24, and he’s dating a 21 year old. There aren’t really adults around in college, but it’s not real adult life. After graduation you’re suddenly expected to be an adult in a way that isn’t defined by your own generation.

EM: Is that why Hannah has so much trouble reaching out to adults who want to be helpful–the first boss she interviews with; her former writing professor?

Elly: I think Hannah has trouble reaching out to anyone, but I also think that there’s an idea that these adults don’t really get it. Part of it is her own arrogance, that her struggles are unique: “I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drummer, ever since I cut my camp shirt into a halter top.”

Part of it goes back to her facetious line in the first episode: “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice, of a generation.” It’s more of a sound-byte than a piece of dialogue, but it does reveal a lot about the way Hannah sees herself. She’s kind of a disaster, but she also has the impossible task of representing what it’s like to be a woman her age. So the effect is that adults don’t get it, because her troubles are unique to her generation, but her friends don’t get it either, because they don’t have the same prophetic burden that she does.

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Actress Lena Dunham in a Wes Gordon gown at the Met Ball in 2012.

Part 5. The “EEWWW” Factor

EM: Look—I’ll just say it outright: My biggest problem with Girls is that I feel that a lot of what is happening has an “eewww” factor. Yes, there is a part of me that wants to cover my ears and close my eyes until a scene goes away.

Then I see a scene like the one in which Hannah helps her mother carry her father into the bedroom after his “sex accident” in the shower. Just when I expect to hear a “eewww” response from Hannah, we get an incredibly loving, and absolutely true– “of course you’re embarrassed; because this is horribly embarrassing for everyone involved.”

Why are relationships that seem to be stable–or men who seem to be nice–treated with such contempt by Hannah and Marni?

Hannah just can’t seem to understand that Eric, the pharmacist, whom she reconnects with back home “just wants to have sex”. She keeps trying to figure out what sex game he wants her to play. And most heartbreaking—for me—is that Marnie breaks up with Charlie because he “respects” her too much.

Elly: But the thing is Charlie doesn’t actually respect her that much–but he checks off all the boxes of what a “good boyfriend’ is supposed to be like, and so Marnie doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about what’s actually wrong with the way he’s treating her. Hannah doesn’t either–she has a hard time accepting that Marnie’s boyfriend is “too perfect.” Charlie is one of those guys who doesn’t really try to understand what Marnie wants or needs, and can excuse his own shortsightedness with his “nice guy” image.

EM: Maybe, but he does have a nice apartment .

Elly: No he doesn’t. He made a loft bed himself out of unfinished plywood.

I think Marnie is kind of a b—-, too, but I don’t fault her for not wanting to be with Charlie. There is a certain kind of manipulation that guys like that get away with, and Charlie does get away with it until Hannah calls him out after calling Marnie a “c—” in the most recent episode.

EM: There are also those moments when Hannah just plain crosses a line. She jokes with a prospective boss in season 1 about being a “date rapist”, and then blurts out to George that Elijah has “HPV” Does she even have a filter mechanism?

Elly: I think that those moments when Hannah crosses a line are no different from moments in any other TV show. Comedy always has elements that push boundaries. The difference, I think, is that she’s a woman.

EM: I guess my real anguish about the character comes when she is hurt. Her father says : “She’s such an anxious person, I wish I could unburden her.” I feel like that. (Can I send her a check and some brownies?)

Elly: If you want you can send me a check and some brownies.

EM: Just promise me you won’t ever play ping pong in just your underpants. (I’m pretty sure you can get hurt that way.)